The Faith Instinct (10 page)

A high degree of commitment was vital to the survival of groups that were locked into fierce competition with one another. Because religious commitments are more powerful than any other kind, “evolution has built into human beings a strong propensity to seek a religious orientation toward life and to hold this orientation to be of the highest value,” Irons wrote.
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Biologists who study animal signaling have noted that cheap signals can be imitated and thus lose their value. Trustworthy signals are those that are very costly to produce and cannot be counterfeited. Only very healthy peacocks can afford to grow a magnificent tail, so peahens can rely on this signal in choosing mates. When Thompson’s gazelles spot a leopard, some will jump up and down in a conspicuous movement known as stotting, instead of just running away. This true signal of fitness advertises to the leopard that it needn’t waste its time and would do better to hunt some less healthy gazelle.

Religious behavior too serves as a true signal because religions are learned only in arduous initiation rites and demand a heavy commitment of time. The signals are important to other members of the community. They cannot watch an individual’s movements all the time, but they can assess his sincerity in the ritual.

The signals, it should be noted, are symbolic, and they convey their message far more effectively than could mere words. A man may say “You can trust me!” but greatly more credible is his participation in whatever rituals are required by the group’s religion.

The members of a Jewish sect in Israel known as the Haredim continue to wear the thick black coats and fur hats of their eastern European homeland. “By donning several layers of clothing and standing out
in the midday desert sun,” writes the anthropologist Richard Sosis, “these men are signaling to others, ‘Hey! Look, I’m a Haredi Jew. If you are also a member of this group, you can trust me because why else would I be dressed like this? Only a lunatic would spend their afternoon doing this unless they believed in the teachings of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and were fully committed to its ideals and goals.’”

Because of trust among group members, not only is the problem of free riders eliminated, but members benefit from mutual help. During his study of Haredi communities, Sosis notes, he often saw Haredi travelers being offered free meals, lodging and rides by Haredi hosts who did not know them. “On several occasions I witnessed cars being loaned to complete strangers, and interviews revealed a surprising number of interest-free loans offered and accepted between people who had previously not known each other.”
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Trust and cooperation of this strength are invaluable. It is easy to imagine that cohesiveness of this kind could make a critical difference for small groups constantly at war with one another. Irons, for one, believes that this aspect of religion has been too little appreciated by skeptics because of their focus on religious texts and beliefs rather than on ritual. He writes, “The theory of religion as it applies to commitment emphasizes the vital importance of religion to most human communities and the fundamental [role] that religion plays in the lives of most human beings. The theory also suggests that the core of religion is not belief (which most scientists and intellectuals are prone to criticize), but rather, for the most part, commitment to socially constructive behavior.”

Given the costliness of religious behavior, and its salient role in determining a primitive society’s ability to deal with foes both internal and external, the forces of natural selection seem very unlikely to have ignored it. If religious behavior offered no benefit, groups that wasted time and resources this way would have been eliminated by groups that did not bear such a handicap in the struggle for survival.

Despite the strong likelihood that religious behavior has helped people survive, several biologists deny that it has emerged because of natural selection.

Most of the few biologists who have written on the subject of religion seem to agree that it has an evolutionary origin. But some contend that religious behavior is merely an accidental by-product, dragged into existence in the wake of some other feature favored by natural selection. By this account, religious behavior arose as an inadvertent consequence of some other process and not because it conferred any evolutio
nary advantage. In other words religious behavior, in biologists’ parlance, is nonadaptive, meaning it was not favored by natural selection.

The anthropologist Scott Atran, for example, argues that people use their theory of mind module, together with the brain’s system for detecting unseen agents, to infer the existence of supernatural agents. The agency detection system, always on the alert for potential predators, especially of the human kind, is easily triggered. “The evolutionary imperative to rapidly detect and react to rapacious agents encourages the emergence of malevolent deities in every culture, just as the countervailing evolutionary imperative to attach to caregivers favors the apparition of benevolent deities,” he writes.
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A similar idea has been advanced by another anthropologist, Pascal Boyer. “Concepts of gods and ancestors with whom you can interact require a minor but consequential ‘tweaking’ of standard theory of mind,” he says.
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Both he and Atran view religious behavior as an accidental consequence of the way the brain works and hence as nonadaptive.

How can something be specified by the genes yet not be adaptive? One example is the redness of the blood. Natural selection did not favor individuals with red blood over those with blood of some other color. It favored an efficient method of transporting the respiratory gases between the lungs and tissues. That method employs the hemoglobin family of molecules which, because each contains four atoms of iron, are a vivid red when carrying oxygen. The redness of the blood is accidental, a mere by-product of the trait that was selected for; hence red blood, though genetically specified, is regarded as nonadaptive.

Now a biologist who argues religious behavior is adaptive must then concede that it confers some significant benefit, in the form of whatever caused it to be favored by natural selection. But from the nonadaptive position, religion can be derided as an evil or useless pursuit, with no redeeming feature.

Two well-known biologists who advocate the nonadaptive view are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Both, it so happens, are trenchant critics of religion.

Pinker considers and dismisses three reasons for thinking religious behavior is adaptive and then offers a hypothesis of his own as to why religion is universal. Pinker is a distinguished psychologist and author whose views merit respect, but there is room to differ with his position that religion confers no evolutionary advantage.

The three dismissible adaptive arguments, in his view, are that 1) religion is a source of intellectual comfort in facing death or uncertainty; 2) religion brings a community together; and 3) religion is a source of moral values.

Pinker is probably right to dismiss the first argument; it is hard to see how mental comfort could translate into leaving more progeny, the only measure that natural selection cares about. The third argument Pinker derides by stating that the Bible “is a manual for rape
and genocide and destruction.” The good book, he says, “contrary to what a majority of Americans apparently believe, is far from a source of higher moral values. Religions have given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombings, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so they can happily be united in heaven.”
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But excesses in suppressing the schisms with which established religions are regularly challenged do not alter the fact that religion is nevertheless a source of moral values. Almost all religions encode some form of the golden rule, that of “do as you would be done by,” as well as other moral restraints, and these will be adaptive if they enhance the social fabric.

In countering the second argument, that religion could be adaptive because it fosters group cohesion, Pinker concedes that “religion certainly does bring a community together,” but says this could be achieved by other means. He asks, “Why, if there is a subgoal in evolution to have people stand together to face off common enemies, would a belief in spirits or a belief that ritual could change the future be necessary to cement a community together? Why not just emotions like trust and loyalty and friendship and solidarity? There’s no a priori reason you would expect that abelief in a soul or a ritual would be a solution to the problem of how you get a bunch of organisms to cooperate.”

But however strange religious behavior may seem, this is the means that evolution has found effective. For much of history, emotions like trust and loyalty have generally grown out of a shared religion. And belief in punitive gods, as discussed above, is highly effective at getting people to cooperate for the good of society. There is every reason to suppose the cohesion thus attained would be highly adaptive in the struggle for survival against competing societies.

If religious behavior is not adaptive, as Pinker argues is the case, how did it get to be universal? The explanation he offers is that religion flourishes because it is good for priests, however bad it may be for people. This may be true but stumbles on the fact that religion became universal long before priests existed. Hunter gatherer societies, as noted above, were egalitarian. They had religion but no religious officials, with the possible exception of shamans in certain tribes. Their rituals were communal, with everyone on an equal footing.

Pinker suggests that a trait or behavior should meet three tests before being considered adaptive. The first is that it should be shown to be innate, for example by being universal in its species and developing reliably across a range of environments. Speaking, for instance, meets this criterion but reading does not, since children learn to read only when taught to do so. Religious behavior too would seem to meet the criterion quite well, given that religion is universal and the propensity to learn it appears reliably in every culture around the age of adolescence. Children may be exposed to religion starting from much younger ages but it is rites around the age of puberty that induce an emotional commitment to supernatural beliefs.

Pinker’s second criterion is that the trait should have improved survival in the past, such as during hunter gatherer days. Religious behavior meets this criterion too. It strengthened social cohesion, and thereby a society’s moral fabric and military strength. It evidently enhanced survival so efficiently that societies which failed to inherit the behavior all perished, leaving religious behavior a universal trait of all the survivors.

The third criterion is that the trait should have engineering functionality—it should be something evolution has worked hard to perfect, like the design of the human eye or ear, even if by methods very different from those a human engineer might choose. But religion meets this criterion with flying colors. With nothing but rituals and symbols, it deftly induces members of a community to lay aside their self-interest and make an emotional commitment to the common good, including with the sacrifice of their lives if necessary. By what conceivable means, if not by religion, could such a goal be attained?

Dawkins is another well-known biologist who argues that religious behavior is nonadaptive. Like Pinker, he agrees with the proposals by Boyer and Atran that belief in supernatural agents is a nonadaptive by-product of other brain modules. He begins by conceding that religion is ubiquitous and acknowledging that “universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.”
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Dawkins raises one possible explanation, that religious behavior could indeed have been selected for when the societies with religion wiped out those without it. This raises the question, about which biologists have differing opinions, of whether natural selection can operate at the level of groups, rather than on individuals, an issue discussed further below. All that need be noted here is that Dawkins argues group selection could occur, but not to any significant degree. Hence religion could not have become adaptive through intergroup competition, in his view.

He then notes that people die and kill for their religious beliefs, behavior which he compares to the misfiring of a moth’s navigational system when it flies into a candle flame. Since the moth’s behavior is nonadaptive, so too is religion, Dawkins argues. So what, he asks, “is the primitively advantageous trait that sometimes misfires to generate religion?” His hypothesis is that “There will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you.” Religious belief, in his view, spreads like a virus from parents to impressionable children, a cycle that is repeated every generation. Religion, therefore, is the accidental by-product of children’s propensity to believe what their parents tell them.

This argument seems a little stretched because nonsensical information is not of great help in the struggle for survival and seems unlikely to have been passed on for 2,000 generations in every known human society since the dispersal from Africa. Religion can impose enormous costs, just in the amount of time it takes up, as is evident from the rites of Au
stralian Aborigines. Had religion no benefit, tribes that devoted most of their time to religious ceremonies would have been at a severe disadvantage against tribes that spent all day on military preparations.

Dawkins does not seem highly confident in his gullible child theory because he stresses it is “only an example of the kind of thing that might be the analogue of moths navigating by the moon or the stars.” But without offering any more plausible explanation he insists that “the general theory of religion as an accidental by-product—a misfiring of something useful—is the one I wish to advocate.”